Friday, September 26, 2014

Stunning view number one

Well, you know what it's like. You spend a fortnight sitting on trains, looking idly at beautiful bits of Switzerland (well, actually it's almost all beautiful) and then you get home and you have so many million things to do that you don't have time to blog.

But anyway: we were on 49 trains and a bus. Some of our party were really quite train-geeky. "Oh look!" would go the cry. "This is 39.8 coupling! And it's joining a Federal wagon to a Confederate!" (Or words to that effect.)

And people would crowd round, exclaiming, "I've only ever seen that on the Geneva line!" and write things down in their little notebooks.

Meanwhile I'd be examining the window boxes and wondering how they get their geraniums to bloom so prolifically.

My parents were on holiday in Europe somewhere (may even have been Switzerland) and commented on the beautiful window boxes everywhere. They were told that the locals got a significant discount on their equivalent of council tax if they kept their gardens pretty and their window boxes blooming. If that were to be introduced in Edinburgh, I would be bankrupt and you would be living tax free!